Page 36 of Roma King
“All right. Well…I hope that’s the case.”
Yuri’s smile is still fixed in place. “Thank you, Ms. Llewelyn. There are only a few people who know about Corey’s disappearance right now. Detective Holmes, the chief of police, your boss, and yourself, of course. I have come here tonight to appeal to your kind nature. To ask you to keep this matter to yourself. If something like this were to appear in the news, it would draw a lot of…attention. Not to mention make my family look weak. You understand?”
Fuuuuck.
I was out canvasing an entire area of the city last night, telling people about a missing little boy named Corey. And now, here is Yuri Petrov, most definitely the most dangerous man I have ever stood face to face with, asking me for my silence.
I repeat.
Fuck.
“Of course. I already told Detective Holmes I wouldn’t say anything to anyone.” God, this is bad. This is really, really bad. I was careful not to be too specific last night, but now I’m freaking out.
Petrov displays a set of surprisingly white teeth as his smile broadens. “Wonderful. I anticipated your helpful response and took the liberty of sending you a small gift. I hope you don’t mind. Just a small token of the Petrov family’s appreciation. I will leave you to get home now. I’m sure you’re tired. And please…don’t worry about Corey. I thank you for your concern. It means a great deal. Good night,Solnyshko.”
His footfall echoes as he steps away from my car and begins to walk across the parking lot. It’s fear that makes me call out after him, rather than curiosity. “Mr. Petrov?”
He turns.
“What does that mean?Solnyshko?”
He looks surprised. Then amused. “It means, ‘small sun.’ Your hair is very unusual, Ms. Llewelyn. The color burns quite remarkably, even in the dark.”
13
PASHA
DR. CHOI
I’ve done plenty of illegal shit in my day.Plenty. I’ve been on the straight and narrow recently, though, focusing on the studio, and the fights have given me plenty of opportunity to blow off any excess steam I might have built up. I still know a few things, though. More importantly, I still know a few people in Spokane who are willing to bend a few privacy laws, or outright break them if you give them enough money. It’s two in the morning as I sit in the waiting room of Dr. Choi’s emergency dental surgery, watching the small T.V. cycle through commercials for teeth whitening, veneers, braces and implants, I run my tongue over my own teeth. I’m not contemplating getting work done, though. My grill is just fine. I’m thinking abouther.
The red hair. The pale freckles. The annoyance on her beautiful face. Not to mention the swell of her perfect tits underneath her shirt. She’d taken me by surprise. I wasn’t prepared to come face to face with a beautiful woman as I came hurtling out of Shelta’s tent. That surprise had rooted me to the spot for a second, but after that…it was the earth-shattering realization that I knew her that had me pausing, studying her face a little closer, trying to figure outwhereI knew her from.
I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but it had dawned on me almost immediately. It washer. The girl.Thegirl, and she was standing right in front of me, wearing an expression of shock, her cheeks turning a bright shade of red. Had Shelta not just warned me to stay the fuck away from her, literally only five seconds before I ran into her, then I might have tried to talk to her. I might have…fuck, I don’t know what I might have done, but I probably wouldn’t have warned her off entering the tent, and then just fucking walked away. By the time I’d hurried out of the fair, head ducked down, focus on the ground, determined not to make eye contact with anyone, and gone up the stairs, out on the street, I’d already decided I was going to wait for her. To talk to her, to figure out who the fuck she is, after all this time, but then she came racing up the stairs, shouting and ranting, and she fuckinghitme.
The girl was barely five foot five, and she definitely hadn’t been lifting weights recently. The punch she landed on my arm didn’t even sting. But the sheer stones on her, though. Most grown men don’t talk to me the way she did. They certainly don’t fuckingyellat me. I hadn’t been able to cage the laughter that had forced its way up my throat as she’d run off down the street, fuming, with that tall, skinny guy chasing behind her like a little lost dog.
When I’d gotten home, I couldn’t sleep, so I’d paced up and down the loft, thinking so fucking hard I gave myself a headache. At around six in the morning, just as the sky was beginning to lighten over the horizon in the distance, I began to remember things. It was as if meeting her in person, seeing her face, unlocked something deep inside of me, and my dreams began to resurface. Her body beneath my body. Her soft, pliable lips on mine. All of that beautiful, savagely red hair, with the hints of copper and gold.
Dreams aren’t real, of course. I fucking know that. I’ve never slept with her before. Not in real life. I’ve never kissed her. Never held her. Never even fucking spoken to her properly, but…the dreams have always felt like a message. A hint at what could be. And now, it turns out she’s fuckingreal, and life somehow orchestrated the unlikeliest of ways for us to meet. She came to the fair, obviously to get her fortune told by my mother, but there should have been no real way I would have been there last night. I’d decided I would never go back. I fucking swore it to myself three years ago. But a bank got robbed, and a giant dick was tattooed onto an asshole’s back, and I inevitably ended up breaking the promise I’d made to myself.
Life.
Life was a confusing, complicated, tricky little bitch.
“Mr. Rivin? Dr. Choi is ready for you now.” The young woman behind the front desk calls into the waiting room. “Do you need me to show you to his office?” She sounds kind of hopeful that I might take her up on the offer.
“I’m good, thanks. I’ve been here before,” I tell her as I push open the door into the long hallway that leads to Choi’s exam room at the end, on the left. I don’t bother to knock when I reach his office. Inside, Seo-Jun is sitting behind his desk, a video game paused on his monitor, as he’s stuffing a footlong sub into his mouth.
“How the fuck can you eat in here?” I grab a rolling stool and sit my ass down. “Smells like chemicals and bleach.”
“Bleachisa chemical,” Seo-Jun answers, his words muffled by the amount of sandwich he’s trying to chew. He swallows. “You get used to it. A guy’s gotta eat, right?”
I met Seo-Jun at one of my first fights. He’d bet a huge amount of money that I’d win a match when the odds were definitely not in my favor, and then he’d come to find me afterwards. Fucker gave me a bottle of scotch as a thank you for kicking my opponent’s ass, and told me if I ever needed any hacking or cracking done, I could come and see him whenever I liked. I’d been surprised when I first came to him with some work and found myself sitting in a dental office.
Pretty fucking amused with himself, Seo-Jun had explained that his old man was a bit of a tight ass, a traditional Korean father, and had demanded he get himself a reliable, lucrative trade, then packed him off to dental school.
Seo-Jun did as his father demanded, studied, passed his exams with flying colors, graduated and set up his own business, but he’s never actually used his dentistry skills once since then. It’s a cover. A front. A pretty fucking smart way to earn money doing what he really loves: digital fraud, black hat hacking, and identity theft. It’s quite ingenious, really. Dental work costs a fucking shitload, after all. When Seo-Jun’s patients leave at the end of their ‘treatment,’ they hit the front desk, pay their bill, and everything is neat and tidy as you like. Seo-Jun has a profitable business with legitimate books and a legitimate bank account. The bastard even pays his fucking taxes.
